by Matthew Cobb
Something amazing happened. We had been outlaws, but on the plateau we felt like free men. You got carried away with enthusiasm. Something different, an atmosphere of solidarity, the birth of a community, a new relation between officers and soldiers.726
As an expression of this spirit, at the beginning of March the BCRA agent on the Glières sent a bold but ominous message to London: ‘We have decided to occupy the plateau, which is impregnable, and to have as our motto “Live free or die”.’727
But Vichy and the Nazis were equally determined. Hundreds of Gardes Mobiles de Réserve and members of the Milice were sent to the foot of the plateau, and during February and March there was a series of bloody skirmishes.728 The Germans grew impatient and decided to intervene, repeatedly sending the Luftwaffe to bomb the plateau, reinforcing Darnand’s Milice with three infantry batallions (around 7,000 men) and artillery support. The final attack came on 27 and 28 March. Although 300 maquisards managed to escape, another 149 either died in the fighting, were killed in the terrible reprisals that continued for weeks as maquisards were hunted down or executed after perfunctory trials, disappeared into the concentration camps or were toyed with in cruel, lethal games. In scenes of barbarity that were typical of the Nazis, prisoners were allowed to run across fields, before being mown down like rabbits.
For the Communists and the FTP, Glières demonstrated the dangers of trying to gather maquisards together in one place – ‘a monstrous error in strategic conception,’ they wrote – and the correctness of their fluid and highly mobile conception of guerrilla warfare.729 British views were only slightly kinder: the SOE agent in charge of the Glières maquis, Richard Heslop, later claimed he always thought it was ‘nonsensical . . . madness, a glorious stupidity’.730 Despite the awful losses and the strategic errors, because of the terrible sacrifice involved and the unity shown by the different sections of the Resistance, Glières came to symbolize French determination to liberate the country, whatever the cost. This played an important role as the Vichy Minister of Information, Philippe Henriot, made a series of broadcasts pouring scorn on the maquis and their deaths, while carefully avoiding all mention of the involvement of the Nazi troops. While this might have played well in Vichy, it was entirely counterproductive in the Haute-Savoie, where the broadcasts actually helped strengthen local support for the Resistance. As Romans-Petit later put it, ‘Glières a été une défaite des armes, mais une victoire des âmes’731 – ‘Glières was a military defeat, but a victory for our souls.’
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The Resistance in France was not only asserting its military independence: it also flexed its political muscles. While de Gaulle and the Free French played at parliament in Algiers, in France the Resistance set out the shape of the country that would be built on the ruins of Vichy. Two years earlier, Christian Pineau had spent days trying to persuade de Gaulle and his advisers to make some kind of ‘social’ declaration to the Resistance. Throughout the intervening period, Resistance groups had published programmes, declarations and charters designed to put flesh on their opposition to the Occupation.732 None of them had much meaning, for the simple reason that they were plans for the future, not for the present. With D-Day almost literally within reach, that was beginning to change. In April the CNR simply bypassed de Gaulle, the CFLN and the Provisional Consultative Assembly, and published its own ‘Action Programme of the Resistance’, which it then politely sent to de Gaulle, for information.733
Four months in the writing, and the subject of many heated debates, the Action Programme began by making it plain who the Resistance thought would be in control of the ‘national insurrection’ which, as de Gaulle had put it two years earlier, was ‘inseparable’ from national liberation. The insurrection ‘will be led by the CNR’, they declared. Even though such action would not take place immediately but ‘as soon as political and military circumstances permit’ and ‘under the authority’ of de Gaulle’s CFLN, it was clear that the Resistance would be in control. Among the measures that the CNR wanted to see applied ‘as soon as the country is liberated’ were ‘true social and economic democracy’, ‘the broadest possible democracy’ through universal suffrage, the establishment of an economic plan, ‘support for cooperatives in production, buying and selling’, ‘the right to work’, guaranteed spending power and the creation of a fully fledged welfare state, including retirement pensions, a health service and unemployment benefits. All these were slogans shared by the Communists and the Socialists, and made perfect sense to a substantial proportion of the French population, even if they must have caused raised eyebrows in Algiers, London and Washington.
The conclusion of the Action Programme demonstrated the distance travelled by the Resistance since 1940, and quite how far they now were from the ideas of the Free French, who wanted a ‘strong state’, a single party and a providential leader:
. . . we will found a new Republic which will sweep away the profoundly reactionary regime set up by Vichy and which will give the popular and democratic institutions the efficacy that had been taken away from them by the organs of corruption and treason that existed before the capitulation. In this way there will be a democracy which will unite continuity of governmental action with real control by the elected representatives of the people.734
Before the Resistance could hope to put this programme into action, however, there was another force it would have to reckon with: the Allies. Britain, America and the USSR remained deeply distrustful of de Gaulle and the Resistance, and were undecided whether the Free French should play any role at all in governing the country after the Liberation.735 Not only was de Gaulle unpredictable and difficult to manipulate; he was also profoundly hostile to the Allied plan to dismember the French Empire, which spread from Vietnam and New Caledonia to vast tracts of North and West Africa.736 (Even the CNR Action Programme did not propose to make the colonies independent, but merely to give them more democratic rights.)
Recent events in Lebanon, which was under French control, had done nothing to reassure the Allies on this point. De Gaulle’s delegate to the region had responded to a Lebanese declaration of independence by arresting the government, dissolving the parliament and crushing protest demonstrations. Faced with Allied protests and British threats to send troops, the Free French freed the imprisoned politicians.737 This was too little, too late, and at the Tehran conference (28 November to 1 December 1943) Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin (de Gaulle, having no real forces to bring to the table, was conspicuous by his absence) agreed that the US and British armed forces alone would be responsible for liberating France, through Operation OVERLORD, which would be launched in May 1944. There was to be no independent role for the Resistance or for the French people as a whole.
Right up until D-Day, the Allies did not want to see the French control their own country after the Liberation. Instead, they planned to impose AMGOT (Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories), replacing one military occupation with another. De Gaulle, ferociously opposed to this, was equally hostile to the Resistance and its plans for independent action. The Allies and de Gaulle both wanted to keep control of the situation, and would do all in their power to ensure the population did not take any initiatives. And that included the Resistance and its idea of a national insurrection. The outcome of the three-way struggle between the Resistance, the Free French and the Allies, which opened up after D-Day, would decide the future of France, and of the whole of Europe.
10
‘There Was Never a Time Like It’
Early in the morning of 6 June 1944 Marie-Madeleine Fourcade of the ALLIANCE intelligence circuit was in London packing her bags for her return to France when she heard the sound of aeroplanes:
I opened the window and the noise became deafening, but not a single searchlight swept the sky nor had the air-raid warning sounded. It was possible to see the aircraft flying in massed formation above the sleeping capital. They flew over in a never-ending stream. Holding my breath and looking steadily in th
e direction of Nazi Germany, I could see, beyond the barbed wire sealing the frontiers, beyond the prisons, the dawn that was bringing to our enslaved friends the first glimmer of their victory.738
It was D-Day, and Operation OVERLOAD – the biggest military operation in history – was under way. An invasion fleet of nearly 7,000 vessels, including 3,000 landing craft, backed up by 12,000 aircraft, was making its way across the rough Channel seas towards five Normandy beaches on the Bay of the Seine, each designated by code names that have since gone down in history: UTAH, OMAHA, GOLD, JUNO and SWORD.
On that first day, around 150,000 men were landed or parachuted into Normandy. Thousands died, their blood draining into the soil of a country that many of them had never seen before. The news of the landings ran through France like an electric shock. Bernard Pierquin, by now a junior doctor in a Parisian hospital, was riding to work:
I was on my bike, going past the Jardin des Plantes on the Rue Buffon, when a young woman ran across the road towards her husband, shouting out, ‘It’s happened. They’ve landed!’ In the early-morning silence, it was deeply moving.739
Since the beginning of spring 1944 the Resistance and the Allies had been planning what would happen when the landings finally took place, and had drawn up four national sabotage plans – VERT, VIOLET, BLEU and BIBENDUM – each corresponding to a different Resistance target (railways, telecommunications, electricity and troop transport). Late in the evening of 5 June, as the invasion fleet was preparing to leave, the BBC’s French service crackled with ‘personal messages’ – 200 were broadcast in the space of 15 minutes – instructing the Resistance to activate the plans.
The level of Resistance action was proportionally on the same massive scale as OVERLOAD. Within twenty-four hours, the railway network had been paralysed by up to 1,000 acts of sabotage carried out by the Resistance and by SOE circuits. Locomotives were destroyed, trains were derailed and bridges were blown up, reducing rail traffic by fifty per cent. Fifty-one trains stuck in a traffic jam around Lille were easy pickings for Allied aircraft, and with nowhere for trains to go, Parisian mainline stations were closed, bringing the shock of the invasion into the heart of the capital.740 The attacks on the railways were so vital to the Allies because ninety per cent of the German army was still transported by rail or horse. By fragmenting the rail system, the Resistance and SOE disrupted the Nazi riposte and gained valuable hours for the men fighting for their lives on the Cotentin peninsula of Normandy. Over the next six months, millions of men and machines surged into France, including British SAS ‘sticks’, who acted alone or with the Resistance, and ‘Jedburgh’ teams composed of three officers (an American, a Briton and a Frenchman), whose role was to liaise with the Resistance and the advancing armies.741 They came first from the west, then, in August, from the south, as the long-awaited Allied landings on the Mediterranean coast took place. Through their bravery and sacrifice, these men would eventually drive the Nazis out of France – the Allied armies, not the Resistance, created the conditions for the Liberation of France.742 But throughout the summer, the Resistance continued to play a vital role, shaping the momentous events that shook the country.
Over the next few months the Resistance grew enormously. With news of the landings came an immediate shift in the place, role and perception of the Resistance. For four years résistants had given up life and liberty in the painstaking construction of underground movements, many of which had little connection with the majority of the population. They had struggled to unify their forces, squabbled with the Free French over the separation of military and political activity and argued over who commanded the Resistance. All that faded away as the prospect of liberation arrived. As one maquisard from the Grenoble region put it on hearing of the Normandy landings: ‘The underground Resistance is over! Open Resistance begins!’743
Hundreds of thousands of men and women who had previously remained at home – out of fear, uncertainty or simple ignorance as to how to join the Resistance – put on armbands emblazoned with FFI (Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur) and helped liberate their country. Four years earlier, Arthur Koestler had predicted with cynical accuracy what form the Liberation would take. ‘When the scales of success turn in favour of England,’ he wrote, ‘the barricades will emerge from the pavements of the towns of France, the snipers will appear behind the attic windows, and the people will fight as in the old days – but not before’.744
As the summer wore on, all the main cities were liberated and ultimate victory became increasingly certain, the risks of resistance declined and attitudes towards latecomers to the struggle became correspondingly more scornful. These tardy fighters were called résistants du mois de septembre or, in the case of those soldiers who paraded about in carefully preserved uniforms that had not seen service since June 1940, the naphtalinés (‘the mothballed’). But in the initial weeks after D-Day, the outcome was still extremely uncertain. German resistance to the invasion remained strong throughout June and July, and only a narrow strip of land in the far north-west of the country was free of Nazi domination. Those who resisted in June ran terrible risks.
On the evening of D-Day, de Gaulle broadcast to France, warning the population not to launch any ‘premature insurrection’.745 Despite this instruction, all over the country people took the announcement of the invasion as a call for action. The miners of Toulouse immediately went on strike to celebrate the landings, and the Republic was declared from the town hall balcony of the small industrial town of Annonay. Neither of these actions led to any major response, but elsewhere the reaction was more brutal, a chilling contrast to the joyous hopes of the population. A few hours after news of the landings broke, a group of youngsters heard that a maquis was being set up in the hills above Saint-Chinian, north of Narbonne. Wildly enthusiastic, they seized some lorries, bread and supplies and took off. At Fontjun, on the outskirts of Saint-Chinian, they bumped into a German patrol. Five of them were killed instantly, while a further eighteen – including a woman and her husband – were arrested, taken to the prison at Béziers and shot the next day.746
That was nothing compared with the horror that occurred in the region around Limoges. On 8 June the industrial town of Tulle, capital of the Corrèze, was seized by an FTP maquis unit commanded by Jean-Jacques Chapou, who had been involved in the raid on the Figeac aero factory the year before. Chapou had left the Secret Army for the FTP because he was impatient for action; now he had it in spades. When news of the D-Day landings came through, the Communist leadership of the FTP ordered his unit to seize Tulle as part of their hoped-for national insurrection – Limoges was to become ‘a base for resistance and attack’.747 At the same time, the FTP tried to convince Georges Guingouin to send his maquis against the German garrison in Limoges to the north, but he rejected the idea as foolhardy.748 Chapou was more disciplined (or less astute) and on 7 June, armed with Sten guns, mortars and a bazooka, his unit launched a messy, ill-prepared attack on the Nazis and their Milice stooges. During vicious fighting, over fifty German soldiers were killed, and some Nazi prisoners were subsequently executed as Gestapo agents or torturers.749 The next day, a tricolour flew over the FTP headquarters, and, with the exception of a small group of Germans holed up in a school, the town was liberated, accompanied by scenes of general rejoicing. But this did not last for long.
Unknown to Chapou, that morning the 2nd SS Panzer Division ‘Das Reich’ – 15,000 men and over 1,400 vehicles – had roared its way out of Montauban, north of Toulouse. It had instructions to head for the region around Limoges and continue the vicious ‘anti-terrorist measures’ it had been pursuing in the south.750 The massive armoured column moved north through the Lot and the Corrèze, past Cahors and Souillac, heading for Brive, not far from Tulle. With the phone lines cut, a member of the ALLIANCE circuit in Cahors made a desperate attempt to warn the résistants further north of the threat, but the message did not get through.751 All along their route, the Nazis were repeatedly attacked by small, poorly
armed groups of résistants, leaving fifteen German soldiers dead and over thirty wounded. In return, dozens of maquisards were killed – the Nazis draped the body of one of their victims across the front of a half-track as the column ploughed into Brive, giving a terrible warning of what was to come.
As the Das Reich division arrived in Brive, its commander dispatched a reconnaissance group composed of 500 men, half-tracks and armoured vehicles with 75-millimetre guns, eastwards towards Tulle.752 They arrived at dusk, completely unexpected.753 There was a brief but terrifying firefight which left scores of dead – twenty-six maquisards and seventy Germans – and then the Germans retook the town in a matter of minutes.754 The maquisards withdrew, obeying their orders to avoid any engagement with Nazi troops. As Chapou put it that evening in his report on the FTP’s actions: ‘The Tulle operation took place. It was a failure.’755 Less laconically, FTP commander Elie Dupuy recalled the view from the hills above Tulle:
. . . it was like something out of Dante’s inferno. Flares were fired from all directions, while the sound of machine-gun fire, cannons and the explosions of shells drowned out everything else. Tired and beaten, our commanders and our men saw all their efforts, their sacrifices and their hopes evaporate in a matter of minutes.756
The Nazis were appalled at the number of their dead, and at the way the Tulle garrison had been militarily humiliated by the maquisards, whom they despised as terrorists.757 Enraged, the Germans took a dreadful revenge. Early the next morning 3,000 men were assembled in the town square, and at the end of the afternoon the Nazis announced they would hang 120 of them, one by one, from balconies and telegraph poles around the town. By 7 p.m. they had hanged ninety-nine innocent men, aged between seventeen and forty-two. Then, for reasons which remain unclear, the killing stopped. The Nazis may simply have run out of rope.758 A further 311 men were taken to Limoges, and 149 were then deported to Dachau; only 48 of them returned. In total, 200 civilian men died as a result of the Nazi attack on Tulle.759
